Dmitriy Bovykin

Dmitry Yuryevich Bovykin (29 April 1968, Moscow) is a Russian historian, Doctor of Historical Sciences, and the author of Russian textbooks for schools and universities. He specializes in the study of the history and historiography of the French Revolution of the eighteenth century. He is a member of the scientific council of the international Society for Robespierrist Studies. In 1985 he entered the Faculty of History at Moscow State University. In 1986 he was called up for active military service, after which, in 1988, he resumed his studies at the university. He specialized in the Department of Modern and Contemporary History. In 1989 he began studying the French Revolution in the special seminar of Professor A. V. Ado. Under his supervision, he defended his diploma thesis in 1992 on the topic “How to End the Revolution? Debates in the Convention over the Constitution of Year III and the Political Consciousness of the Thermidorians.” After completing his university course, he entered the postgraduate program of the MSU Faculty of History. Under A. V. Ado’s supervision, as his last student, he prepared and in 1996 defended his dissertation for the degree of Candidate of Historical Sciences, “From Thermidor to the Directory: Political Struggle over the Adoption of the Constitution of Year III of the Republic.” Since 1996 he has worked in the Department of Modern and Contemporary History of the Faculty of History at Moscow State University.

In the second half of the 1990s and the early 2000s, together with A. V. Chudinov and other historians of the “new Russian school,” D. Yu. Bovykin carried out a conceptual historiographical shift associated with a rejection of the predominantly Marxist perception of the French Revolution as a transition from feudalism to capitalism, a shift that became clearly visible at the round table “The French Revolution of the Eighteenth Century and the Bourgeoisie” (2001). Specializing in the study of the political life of post-Thermidorian France, D. Yu. Bovykin criticized the widespread notion in Marxist historical literature of this period as the “descending line of the Revolution.” Since 2000 he has been a member of the editorial board, and since 2004 deputy editor-in-chief, of the international publication French Yearbook